3
magazine representation of employed women during the interwar years—a significant
time because increasing numbers of women entered the workplace after suffrage passed
and World War I ended, but their employment became more controversial during the
Great Depression. During this time, the larger project argues, writers and editors framed
employed women in ways that resonated with culturally familiar definitions of socially
constructed femininity. As Ros Ballaster et al. put it, magazines did not take “the world
of paid work as the ground for an alternative definition of the feminine.”
5
For the most
part, then, the work explored in this paper reflects subtly dissident efforts in reframing.
Fleischman, in particular, subverts the emerging yet increasingly dominant frames used
to construct employed women, reworking them so that “feminine” and “employed” were
not opposites.
The work is important because, as media historian Carolyn Kitch argues, it was during
the early twentieth century that media stereotypes extant today were established.
6
Thus
media construction of employed women--whether it is a TV character such as Ally
McBeal or news coverage of Hillary Rodham Clinton--may be rooted in the ways we
learned to see employed women, vis-à-vis media, before World War II.
This paper is built upon theories that see reality as socially constructed and media as
an inseparable part of cultural creation. As Stuart Hall writes, “Things don’t mean; we
construct meaning, using representational systems -- concepts and signs.”
7
One socially
constructed meaning is “femininity.” For Susan Brownmiller, femininity is “a nostalgic
5
Ballaster, Ros, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer and Sandra Hebron. Women’s Worlds: Ideology,
Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan 1991), 123.
6
Carolyn Kitch. The Girl on the Magazine Cover: Gender, Class, and the Emergence of Visual Stereotypes
in American Mass Media, 1895-1930. (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1998), iv.
7
Stuart Hall. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. (London and Thousand
Oaks: Sage, 1997), 25.
Convention